About this blog

I'm a well-known mainframe performance guy, with almost 30 years of experience helping customers manage systems. I also dabble in lots of other technology. I've sought to widen the Performance role, incorporating aspects of infrastructural architecture.

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First, I’m indebted to Ray Mullins for his help in figuring out how to solve the problems I identified as remaining in Alternate Macro Libraries: A Way To Document Assembler Tables .
Indeed he wrote a very handy blog post of his own:
Wrapping your own macro code around vendor-supplied macros without changing source
This post, to summarise, shows how you can use the OPSYN instruction to... [More]

To whoever (In the USA I think) Googled "what is REMOVECC" and got to this blog let me give you my thoughts on the matter. (And yes I know, it being a search, you might never come back to read this.) To understand REMOVECC you have to understand that the "CC" refers to ASA (American Standards Association) Carriage Control, described here . ASA (formerly ANSI) control characters appear in Position... [More]

For whoever got to my blog with this Google search here's how you sort data without a header: First you need to be using z/OS DFSORT Release 10 or to have applied the PTFs for UK90013 (July 2008). Second, the vehicle for doing this is ICETOOL rather than DFSORT itself. Use the new DATASORT operator. Here's an example: If you code DATASORT FROM(DD1) TO(DD) FIRST(3) USING(CTL1) and code a CTL1CNTL... [More]

In September 1997 DFSORT Release 13 was shipped (to coincide with the release of OS/390 Release 4). It took a nice idea from Syncsort and extended it. In case you didn't know OUTFIL allows you to read an input data set (and perhaps sort it) and write to multiple output files from the resulting records - perhaps selecting subsets of the records and reformatting them (and differently to each output... [More]

Now with free map , this is the concluding part of a four part series on batch parallelisation, with especial focus on cloning.
In previous parts I discussed:
Motivation
Classification
Issues
This part wraps up with thoughts on implementation. I'm going to break it down into:
Analysis
Making Changes
Monitoring
While there probably are... [More]

Frank Yaeger of DFSORT Development suggested I pass this tip along to y'all. It's his solution to a problem set by Brian Peterson of UnitedHealth Group... In z/OS Release 12 two new messages were introduced: IEF032I and IEF033I replace IEF374I and IEF376I. The older messages were single-line step- and job-end messages. The new ones are their multiple-line analogues: IEF032I is 3 lines and... [More]

So here's yet another way of parsing the WLM XML Service Definition. This time it's on z/OS, using DFSORT. Relatively recent features in DFSORT have made it easier to do useful things with XML. In this example I've made some attempt to make the output pretty - by creating a HTML table. Below is the SYSIN you need to parse the <SchedulingEnvironment> elements. I'm assuming you know how to... [More]